According
to officials in the nation's regulatory agencies, the main obstacle to
proving or disproving a link between the autism epidemic and the
mercury-based preservative thimerosal that was contained in childhood
vaccines until a few years ago, and is still in flu vaccines, has been the
inability to find a large enough group of people who have never been
vaccinated to compare with people who have.

In fact, a few
months ago, CDC officials claimed that such a study would be nearly
impossible. On July 19, 2005, the CDC held a Media Briefing on the topic
of vaccines and child health. On the issue of government research on
autism, a reporter asked CDC Director Dr Julie Gerberding: “are you
putting any money into clinical studies rather than epidemiological
studies, to verify or disprove the parents’ claim about a particular
channel, a particular mechanism by which a minority of genetically
susceptible kids are supposedly damaged?”

Gerberding replied:
“To do the study that you're suggesting, looking for an association
between thimerosal and autism in a prospective sense is just about
impossible to do right now because we don't have those vaccines in use in
this country so we're not in a position where we can compare the children
who have received them directly to the children who don't.”

Dr Duane Alexander,
of the National Institute of Health, agreed and said: “It's really not
possible ... in this country to do a prospective study now of thimerosal
and vaccines in relationship to autism. Only a retrospective study which
would be very difficult to do under the circumstances could be mounted
with regard to the thimerosal question.”

However, Dan
Olmsted, investigative reporter for United Press International, and author
of the “Age of Autism” series of reports*,
appears to have solved this problem when he came up with the idea of
checking out the nation's Amish population where parents do not ordinarily
vaccinate children.

First he looked to
the Amish community in Pennsylvania and found a family doctor in Lancaster
who had treated thousands of Amish patients over a quarter-century who
said he has never seen an Amish person with autism (“Age of Autism: A
glimpse of the Amish,” Washington Times, June 2, 2005).

Olmsted also
interviewed Dick Warner, who has a water purification and natural health
business and has been in Amish households all over the country. “I've been
working with Amish people since 1980,” Warner said.

“I have never seen
an autistic Amish child -- not one,” he told Olmsted. “I would know it. I
have a strong medical background. I know what autistic people are like. I
have friends who have autistic children,” he added.

Olmsted did find one
Amish woman in Lancaster County with an autistic child but as it turns
out, the child was adopted from China and had been vaccinated. The woman
knew of two other autistic children but here again, one of those had been
vaccinated.

Next Olmsted visited
a medical practice in Middleburg, Indiana, the heart of the Amish
community, and asked whether the clinic treated Amish people with autism.

A staff member told
Olmsted that she had never thought about it before, but in the five years
that she had worked at the clinic she had never seen one autistic Amish.

On June 8, 2005,
Olmsted reported on the autism rate in the Amish community around
Middlefield, Ohio, which was 1 in 15,000, according to Dr Heng Wang, the
medical director, at the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children.

“So far,” according
to Olmsted, “there is evidence of fewer than 10 Amish with autism; there
should be several hundred if the disorder occurs among them at the same
166-1 prevalence as children born in the rest of the population.”

In addition to the
Amish, Olmsted recently discovered another large unvaccinated group. On
December 7, 2005, it was reported in “Age of Autism” that thousands of
children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago
have at least two things in common with Amish children: they have never
been vaccinated and they don't have autism.

Homefirst has five
offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors. “We have about
30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I
don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us
who never received vaccines,” said Dr Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's
medical director who founded the practice in 1973.

Olmsted reports that
the autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to
state Education Department data. In treating a population of 30,000 to
35,000 children, this would logically mean that Homefirst should have seen
at least 120 autistic children over the years but the clinic has seen
none.

It looks like the
problem is finally solved. Thanks to autism's Dick Tracy, the government
now has thousands of unvaccinated people to compare to people who were
vaccinated.

Evelyn
J. Pringle
is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist
focused on exposing corruption in government. She can be reached at:
e.pringle@sbcglobal.net.Dan Olmstead's "Age
of Autism" Series to Date